SWIMMING POOL (2003)
Focus Features

By Désirée I. Guzzetta

Director François Ozon's latest, Swimming Pool, is an erotic thriller which is sextacular in titillating its audience, but not quite as spectacular in stimulating any other emotions.

"I'm not the person you think I am." So says writer Sarah Morton (Charlotte Rampling) to a fan who makes the mistake of approaching the typically stiff British woman on the tube in London. Morton has hit a creative slump with her Inspector Dorwell mystery series and wants to branch out into something different. Her publisher, John Bosload (Charles Dance), perhaps tired of having to mollycoddle his difficult client, sends her to his house in France for some fresh air, which she agrees to after securing a promise from him that he will eventually join her, implying an affair between the two which is one of the film's lingering ambiguties.

Along comes Bosload's typically saucy French daughter, Julie (the delicious Ludivine Sagnier), whose noisy ways -- especially her bad habit of bringing home strange men whom she then beds as loudly as possible -- disrupt the lovely peace Morton has settled into. The contrast between the two is echoed by their reactions to the pool in the backyard, which Julie will swim in even when it is filled with leaves and other flotsam, and which Morton cannot look at without feeling disgust over its filthy condition.

As the two women clash -- young vs. old, loose vs. uptight -- Sarah becomes intrigued by Julie's lifestyle, creating a file about Julie on her computer. She resorts to snooping around, finding Julie's diary and incorporating it into her work. Sarah gradually begins loosening up, becoming a little more like Julie as the film progresses. Shades of Bergman's Persona? Perhaps. Things get weird and complicated from there, especially after Julie discovers Sarah's invasion of her privacy and brings home a local waiter, Franck (Jean-Marie Lamour), whom Sarah has been flirting with, to be her next conquest. The much-ballyhooed twist at the end, while not a shocker for the careful viewer, is ambiguous enough to produce multiple theories on its meaning.

There's much to recommend this film, not the least of which is the acting by the two leads. Rampling does a terrific job as the buttoned-up Morton, a woman so closed off she can't even accept a compliment from a fan. Sagnier's Julie evinces an easy sexuality and frequently runs around topless or fully nude with nary a bit of self-consciousness. The tension between the two women drives the film forward even when the plot bogs down in its own cleverness. The cinematography is exceptional -- for example, once the pool is clean, it sparkles brilliantly. The pace set by Ozon moves along languidly at first, like you're floating in a calm pool of your own, then picks up speed once Julie's insecurities explode into violence.

The literary underpinnings of the story also add to its pleasures, but have an unfortunate side effect. On one level, the film is a meditation about the creative process, but the literary touches pulled me out of the film experience once I figured out what Ozon was up to and prevented me from any emotional investment in the characters or their fates. Ozon definitely has more on his mind than he was able to translate to the screen in this case, but that same ambitiousness of his will have me checking out his future (and past) projects. Normally, a film with a twist ending is the kind of film I unlazy myself to see more than once so I can look for the clues I might have missed in the first viewing, but in the case of Swimming Pool, the initial viewing was enough. The excellent acting, beautiful shots, and some deft comic touches, though, made that one viewing worth it, even if I never got emotionally involved in the charaters' inner life as much Ozon seemed to want.

More info: www.focusfeatures.com/home.php or www.francois-ozon.com/anglais/index2.html

Focus Features
Director: François Ozon
Screenwriter: François Ozon and Emmanuèle Bernheim
Starring: Charlotte Rampling (Sarah Morton), Ludivine Sagnier (Julie), Charles Dance (John Bosload),
Marc Fayolle (Marcel), and Jean-Marie Lamour (Franck)
Running Time: 1 hour, 42 minutes
Rated: R

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